To complete my “day in the life of my avatar” blog, I want to explain my last day in my virtual world before my subscription expired. This last day of being in World of Warcraft is representative of daily life events because it is a representation of what I had achieved that far. I did not become an expert in World of Warcraft as I only reached level 30 (maximum level is 80 I believe), but I did enjoy playing and exploring in a fantasy world and leveling due to personal achievements.

Once logged into my account on World of Warcraft, I rez into focus. I am a female night elf hunter. Before even moving anywhere I attend to housekeeping activities which I do every time I log on to WoW. The first thing I do is check my item bags.

As seen in the screenshot above, I check all of my items to see what I had last had to see what I can sell. I never discovered how to use the auctioneer to sell items (nor did I want to figure it out, like many other confusing things in this game), I always sold items the first thing to vendors to cash in my rewards to obtaining certain items. Each of the bags I had for items were organized into categories. The categories helped me when in battle so I knew exactly where to find a potion or a healing power to access it quicker, as battling is all about efficiency, for me anyway. One bag held potions or bandages that would heal my character in battles or after a battle. One bag held quest items. Quest items are items which are used to fulfill quests, which can be found, taken from dead enemies, or given to my character by computer characters whom a character accepts quests from.

The screenshot above shows the computer character Feero Ironhand who wishes to reward me for protecting him as he delivers supplies to another computer player. More on quests will appear later on in this post. The other two bags hold random items found during battles and other miscellaneous items that may help my character in battle. The final bag is for pet food. Hunters in World of Warcraft have pets which act as tanks in battles. Just as your own health points decrease when attacked, so do a hunters pet health points. For some reason I do not have a screen shot of my pet, but it is a cat, a snow leopard. I make sure that my pet’s health is up to par and then I continue on with my day.

The list of objectives seen in the above screen shot to the right hand side is the list of quests I have logged into doing at the moment. Since WoW is a very large world, quests can be done just about anywhere. Some involve your character travelling across the whole countryside to complete, which is why my character has many built up, as I had not explored the entire world of Aseroth at this point (and probably never will).

In order to complete my research for our final project, I often teamed up with other players who were doing similar quests. We would help each other out by levelling or helping kill an enemy. This is when I got most of my research for our final project, while enjoying the game-play of WoW.

The above screen shot is the map of the current location my character is in. Yellow question marks and the numbered locations show where my character can accept quests, and where I can complete quests. The more quests your character completes, the more experience points your character receives, therefore it is important to do as many quests as possible to level up and become stronger. On a normal day such as this one, I checked my map to see which accepted quests were closest to me to complete.

There are many different ways to travel around the world of Azeroth. Currently, as seen in the first screen shot, my character is on a mount which is a sabre tooth tiger. It was my first and only mount, and was much faster at travelling around the vast amount of landscape that I had discovered to that date. Other ways of travel are by boat, and by hyppogryph.

The above screen shot is my character riding the hyppogryph to the next destination. The next destination is a small town called Astranaar. In Astranaar I was just selling items to vendors when, I was attacked and killed. Since I still consider myself a n00b (all I know is how to quest and level, power gamer much?) I’m not actually sure how this villain killed me, but he did, which created awesome opportunity for screen shots.

These two screen shots depict what my character looks like dead. The first one is what my character looks like dead before it’s spirit is released, and the second one is what the world looks like once a character is a spirit or a ghost. Once a character releases its spirit, it’s starting point is at the nearest graveyard. In order to resurrect your character, you must find your character’s body as a spirit and then once in a range of your body, you can resurrect yourself with a little bit of damage done to your health. Since it was my final day playing the game, I thought it was a foreshadowing of my character once I stopped playing. Instead of leaving my character for dead, the last screen shot I took was of my body resurrected, yet invisible to enemies with the last player to kill me in the background. A little sinister, but a great shot.

Overall I enjoyed playing World of Warcraft. I don’t think I would have ever played it if I hadn’t of taken this course. But now when I hear people talking about WoW or other online massively multi player games, I can chime in with my own experience, and prove that it is not just geeks who play these games. Or am I now a geek?